


Chosen

by Roadie



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 18:25:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15913776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie
Summary: It’s because Alex has been read by Purity. That experience — of being manipulated and aggravated and having all of her worst feelings escalated and elevated — was one of the worst things she’s ever felt, like having her soul sucked out through her skin.If Purity’s going to do that to Maggie, well.She’ll have to go through Alex first.Canon divergence post-3x13. Maggie is seconded to the DEO during the fight with the Worldkillers. Maggie and Alex face Purity together.





	Chosen

**Author's Note:**

> Back in February, before we knew how the Worldkiller storyline would play out, I wrote a [little twitter-fic](https://twitter.com/RoadieN60/status/961693904528486402) that imagined what might happen if Maggie, working with the DEO, came up against Purity. Twitter seemed to enjoy it, so I said I'd write a full-length version that's more resolved -- and here, many many months later, it is.
> 
> Canon-divergence post-3x13, so Alex doesn't have her new suit.

**Five**.  


It was J’onn’s idea to have Maggie seconded over to the DEO until the battle with the Worldkillers ended.

For one thing, they’d benefit from the NCPD liaison, and he didn’t want to put the resources into reading in someone new. But more importantly, he said, Maggie was tough in a way that few people were.

The DEO was full of tough people. To make it through training, every field agent had to prove they could strap in to a helmet and a vest and turn down their souls and their fears and their loves and their desires for as long as it took to do even the most dangerous job. A third of their staffing was made up of ex-SEALs and Green Berets and a handful of disillusioned CIA and one or two former military contractors. And while J’onn tried not to eavesdrop, he was aware of his team’s mental processes, the shape of the psychic buzz in the armory when his teams suited up before an op. He told Alex that he could feel them compartmentalizing, putting their spouses and mothers and children into a mental box and locking them there, as best they could, before heading out into the fire.

When J’onn was trying to convince Alex that they needed Maggie, he explained all this to her. And then he explained that Maggie put nothing away. The Maggie who suited up and stepped into the fray was the same Maggie who locked her gun in her safe at home and went out to the bar for an evening with friends.

He’d known only few people who could step into the field without boxing up their fears and their emotions. Alex’s process was precarious, like putting a lid on a fire while keeping it burning: she would herd her loved ones into an insulated space on the periphery of her conscious thought. Kara went first, because in the face of danger to the planet, she had to learn to think of Supergirl as a comrade-in-arms more than as family. Then her parents, and any grief they might feel at losing her. Maggie went in last, even now that her memory was wrapped in regret. This was not, J’onn said, a problem, or an expression of weakness. Most people who _didn’t_ need to compartmentalize were sociopaths.

But Maggie could step into a fight at a moment’s notice, exactly as herself. Not a facsimile, not a shadow, no mental cages with rattling doors, but with every foible and friendship and trauma and tragedy and experience of glee and euphoria in its proper place.

Maggie could do all these things, and she _wasn’t_ a sociopath.

(What Alex understood, and J’onn might not, was that Maggie had nothing to compartmentalize because Maggie, especially since their breakup, had so little to lose.)

So Alex agreed to have Maggie seconded over to the DEO. They were forced to set aside any lingering baggage so that Alex could give Maggie a crash-course in DEO field readiness and arms training.

Maggie was good. Very good. Alex had always known she was a good shot, and she knew how to brace herself against the kick of even the most powerful firearms because, at her size, she had to brace herself to shoot anything bigger than a handgun.

“If I didn’t know how to handle my size, Danvers, I’d never have made it this far in the force. But then,” Maggie shrugged, “you already knew that.”

Alex swallowed, and squared her shoulders, and took the barb.

At the end of a tense week of training, Alex knew there was nobody else she could ever have trusted so well.

Just a week after that, the DEO finds Purity, again, in a subway station. They immediately deploy to contain her, armed with all the new technology they can use.

Winn’s Purity-proof earplugs are genius, really. They block Purity’s screams, but allow close-proximity conversation at normal volumes. But insulating against the frequency of Purity’s screams also involves blocking the secure communications frequencies. Winn explains that the only way around that would be to physically install new encrypted signal towers around the city, which would require not only time they don’t have, but a whole mess of bureaucracy with the FCC. So when the earplugs go in, all communication within the team has to go analog. Speech works at short distances, but long distances require hand signals.

Now, as they’re finishing the blockades on the subway station entrances and are preparing to go in from all sides, Maggie’s presence sits like ballast in Alex’s stomach, tugging it to steady when all it wants to do is turn and flip and roll.

In the armory, Maggie had suited up in DEO tac gear and, smirking a little, tucked her badge  into her belt. She might be seconded to the DEO, but Alex knew but she’d never want to be mistaken for black ops.

(“I don’t ever want to do anything I can’t attach my face and my name to,” Maggie had said a year before, when Alex had floated the idea that she might join the DEO. “I quit hiding a long time ago.”)

As Maggie had fitted her hair under her helmet, as she positioned her badge, Alex was aware of every gesture and movement of it, despite being fifteen feet away and suiting up in her own armor at the time. Alex could feel her, like a sixth sense, making the hair of her forearms stand on end. She’d been aware of her every movement.

So Alex runs the Alpha squad and sends Maggie to back up Demos on Bravo, because despite everything they’ve been through, she and Maggie can communicate more in a shared glance than anybody could do with DEO hand signals.

Demos is good; Alex trusts him and he’ll run point on the op if she goes down. And Maggie, who has a tendency to break formation if she thinks a leader is incompetent, respects him enough to follow his command. NCPD are clearing the streets surrounding the subway station, with a SWAT division waiting to fall in to support the DEO if needed. If Alpha goes down and Demos takes point, Maggie will be responsible for calling in the NCPD support.

Alpha team is queued up behind Alex at the Orange Avenue south entrance to the station. Bravo are a half-block down the street, queued up at the north entrance.

For the first time since Maggie was brought over to the DEO, Alex seeks out her gaze and refuses to let herself feel strange or sorry about it. Maggie shifts her weight from one foot to the other, looking down at her boots, settling herself in them the way she does before sparring, and then lifts her gaze straight into Alex’s eyes. She nods once, confident and professional, and Alex lets herself wonder, just for a moment, why this whole op feels so very different from most others just because Maggie’s here.

It’s also different because Kara isn’t here. Supergirl can’t support this mission because every DEO agent is armed with a syringe of concentrated kryptonite on their tac belts. To Alex, it feels like she’s carrying poison. If she were mortally wounded, her sister couldn’t reach her, couldn’t come to hold her hand, unless someone pulled the kryptonite off her belt.

(But Maggie is here. Maggie would hold her hand. And Maggie would know to get rid of the kryptonite so that Kara could get to her, too.)

J’onn is here, but he hangs back. Purity is a psychic species unlike any he’s ever seen, he says. And because he, too, is a psychic species, she has additional cognitive pathways into his mind compared to non-telepaths. If she battered through his defenses, there would be no telling what weapon she could make of him.

“It’s a misnomer to call them superpowers,” he’d said ruefully to Alex. “They’re just powers. They bring their own sets of vulnerabilities along with their strengths.”

Alex looks around, now. Everyone’s in formation. Demos’s eyes are on her. So are Maggie’s. She glances over at J’onn and he nods at her, his arms crossed over his broad chest.

She looks at Demos and nods once. He acknowledges.

Then she holds up her left hand for attention and counts down the charge on her fingers, knowing that Bravo will then count fifteen and fall in after them.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

Go.

It goes to shit in about ten seconds. Purity can’t scream through the earplugs, but she’s telekinetic and telepathic and she’s learned from the last time she was caught. She takes seconds to sew havoc in both squads; some of them pull out their own earplugs, others turn against one another. Within seconds, the air smells like sweat and flesh and shorted-out electronics. The screaming and crashing sounds are distorted and unnatural through the earplugs, scratching like needles down the back of Alex’s neck.

Alex and Demos have both learned basic psychic shielding from J’onn. The pressure is vice-like around Alex’s mind, building up in her sinuses like the feeling of being in a plane that’s coming in too steep for a landing, but she manages to hold the shield up and signal for Demos to join her.

She doesn’t expect Maggie--who did not receive training in psychic shielding--to follow him.

Maggie, who’s clearly unnerved by the chaos surrounding them, dodging as one mind-controlled DEO agent dive-tackles at her knees and ducking as another throws a fist at her, but who’s clearly still present, still maintaining control over her own mind.

This, Alex realizes, must be what J’onn had seen in her.

Alex, struggling not to groan under the mental pressure, manages to fire a kryptonite bolt at Purity, blasting her back through an open door into some kind of utility room. The door catches on the draft and slams behind her, but that does nothing to relieve the psychic pressure.

“Sawyer,” she says, teeth gritted under the strain, “Demos and I will hold her. You get backup.”

Maggie looks from Alex’s grimace to Demos’s and back again. “Me?” she says, pointing to herself, as if to make doubly sure.

“Yes, you.” Alex jerks her chin toward the nearest exit. “Get SWAT on standby.”

“You really think it’s a good idea to bring more bodies into this mess?” As if to make her point, the sound of shattering glass, something smashing a ticket window, interrupts her, and Maggie throws an open hand in the direction of the sound. _See?_

Alex glares, taps her forehead twice and points to the stairs, the DEO hand signal for, _Subordinate officer, go that way._

But Maggie shakes her head, her eyes flitting up to the sweat beading on Alex’s forehead. “You two go up, I can handle her.”

Alex grits her teeth. “Sawyer--”

“You _know_ it’s the only smart move.”

“You are not--”

“She’s right,” Demos says. All the veins in his temples are pulsing with the effort of his control. “Purity’s not hurting her. You know I don’t say that lightly.”

 _Traitor_ , Alex thinks, but she also knows that Demos is proud and a little arrogant and hates nothing more than handing over responsibility.

Maggie hoists her own kryptonite rifle. “I can hold her.”

Alex swallows and pops her ears, trying to relieve at least a little of the pressure. It doesn’t work.

“Ff-fine,” she says. “Demos, you go up. Sawyer, you’re with me.”

“Alex--”

The use of the first name, the casual intimacy of it, is what makes Alex snap. “I said you’re with me, _Detective Sawyer_.”

It works. Maggie’s mouth snaps shut. Demos nods, salutes, and heads for the exit.

Alex turns toward the utility room. “I’ll take point.”

“Danvers--”

“You’re on my six, Detective, and that’s not a suggestion.”

It’s not a power move. It’s not about making a point.

It’s because Alex has been read by Purity. That experience — of being manipulated and aggravated and having all of her worst feelings escalated and elevated — was one of the worst things she’s ever felt, like having her soul sucked out through her skin.

If Purity’s going to do that to Maggie, well.

She’ll have to go through Alex first.

 

* * *

  

**Four.**

 

“Non-telepaths tend to assume that psychic shielding is a matter of putting up a kind of force field around your mind to close it off,” J’onn said, “but that’s a stiff, brittle form of defense, and against the strength of a powerful psychic, it would snap like a dead tree in a storm. The strongest resistance is a soft, flexible one that moves with the pressure rather than pushing back against it. It’s a hard skill to master. One that, compared to most Martians, I’m not very good at.”

They were sitting on a mat in the training room. Alex glanced over at Demos to her right, who was fixing J’onn with a concentrated gaze. She looked at Kara to her left, and Kara glanced back at her, her eyes twitching with a flicker of a supportive smile.

She was thinking the same thing, Alex knew: if J’onn wasn’t very good at it, how on earth could _they_ become good at it?

“Telepathic control operates on the level of suggestion at your weakest points, where you feel guilt, self-loathing, sadness, anger, or rage,” J’onn continued. “A telepath can feel those emotions in the texture of your mind the way you can feel the bruises in an apple by running your fingers over its skin. In an attack, a telepath will find those points and press at them until the weakness spreads, expanding the area that’s susceptible to influence.”

Alex imagined driving her thumb into bruised fruit, spreading the rot.

(She imagined the words _we can’t be together_ , the smell of a musty duffel bag and a few months of dust disturbed, the solemn finality of a door closing.)

J’onn went on: “The key to putting up a powerful shield is more subtle and difficult than putting up a barrier: it lies in being kind to yourself. If you can release your anger, if you can forgive yourself for your regrets, then you remove the soft points of access for a psychic attack.

“But in practice, shielding is like trying to meditate in a war zone. You have to release the thoughts that want to take hold of you, over and over again, and you have to do it under the pressure of anther mind pushing you toward the things you’re trying to avoid.”  
  
Alex swallowed and centered herself, stacking her vertebrae. Remembered doing the same thing in yoga class. Remembered struggling not to laugh in the silence, and Maggie swatting her on the knee, even as she fought off the impulse to laugh, too. Remembered Maggie crying--

Air fled Alex’s lungs, forcing her eyes open. She was cotton-mouthed, her tongue suddenly swollen and numb.

Purity had taunted Alex with the gaping, gnawing space in her chest, and how she’d put it there herself.That emptiness made her heart feel like it beat in a hollow cavern, trying to pretend its own echo was company enough to be happy.

Maggie’s absence wasn’t a bruise in the skin of an apple: it was a deep, rotten gash.

Alex would need to put in a lot of work to get any good at this. Nothing makes you want to dwell on something quite like actively trying not to think about it.

She closed her eyes and tried to figure out how to begin to forgive herself.

 

* * *

 

**Three.**

  
Alex, sweating, shoulders the door to the subway utility room, her grip and aim strong even as her head throbs with the effort of relaxing into her shield. She feels Maggie calm and steady behind her.

The room smells of latex and bleach.

The back wall is made up of built-in shelves full of cleaning supplies: bottles of Clorox, mops, buckets, disposable gloves. Purity crouches before it, her arms resting loosely over her knees, waiting for them.

The door slams shut, sudden enough to make Alex flinch, and then--

Nothing.

The pressure disappears from Alex’s mind and she feels herself give a psychic gasp, like the first breath after too long underwater. The cacophony from outside, of agents fighting and damaging property, has vanished too, and Alex can imagine her teams blinking at one another, wondering how on earth they’d found themselves throwing fists at members of their own crew.  
  
Alex moves to the side, and in her peripheral vision, sees Maggie reach back for the door handle and tug on it, her eyes never leaving Purity and her rifle never leaving its ready state.

“Oh, that won’t work,” Purity ducks her chin and lifts her shoulders, arching a bit, like a lioness contemplating a vole that’s dared to venture close to her claws. Her voice is gentle, but ominous: she wants them to be scared, but not to run. “But that’s okay,” she says, “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

It would be unsettling enough on its own, but Purity isn’t including Alex in this “we.” Her eyes are fixed, unwavering, on Maggie, who has shifted out from behind Alex’s shoulder.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Purity says, her voice liquid, seductive. “I could have left. I could have flown straight up through this ceiling and out of here, but you, Maggie Sawyer, I feel something in you. You feel it too, don’t you? That… pull? A kinship.”

Alex has been studying Purity and the worldkillers for weeks. She’d helped design a containment strategy for the support forces still above-ground. She’d helped develop the weapons they were carrying.

But clearly, despite all the preparation, they’re underprepared. Because Purity is working some new, unpredictable angle that Alex could not have foreseen and does not understand.

Maggie, always cool under pressure, doesn’t take the bait. “Why don’t you come with us, then?” she says, “We can talk through our family issues back at the DEO.”

Purity smiles, wearing empathy like a mask over something more sinister. “You’d love to talk through family issues at the DEO, wouldn’t you? Or anywhere else for that matter. Because to talk through family issues, well. That would mean you had a family.”

The pieces snap violently into place. _You’re all the family I need_ , Maggie had said to Alex, in one of the last moments when their relationship felt warm and comfortable.

Purity has scanned Maggie’s hopes and fears and regrets like suits in a poker hand, and now she’s playing her off of Alex in a mad gamble to destroy a threat while gaining an acolyte.

“Hey!” Alex barks. She takes a step forward to put herself herself back between Maggie and the Worldkiller. But Purity raises a hand toward her, half-dismissal, half-threat, and she freezes.

If Alex spooks her, she’ll take off through the ceiling, and all this--the sting, the damage outside--will have been a waste.

The power here lies with Maggie, then, and her ability to withstand Purity’s rhapsodic seduction.

Purity rises slowly from her crouch, her eyes still locked on Maggie’s. “It’s cute that she wants to protect you now, isn’t it? Acting like you _matter_ to her.”

“I _do_ matter to her,” Maggie says, but her tone, more timid and uncertain, belies the relief Alex might feel from the words. She doesn’t believe herself. Alex hasn’t given her a reason to.

Purity hears it, too, and twists the knife, digging for Maggie’s heart. “Well she’s got a funny way of showing it. One day it’s ‘forever,’ the next day you’re on the curb. Again.”

Alex shudders. Surely Maggie, even in her grief, even under pressure, knows it was never about abandonment? The fact that they wanted different things doesn’t mean that Maggie is somehow inadequate. Surely, given what they had together, she knows that.

“Maggie,” she says, “don’t listen to her--”

“ _She’s_ given up the right to tell you what to do.” Purity snaps, and Alex realizes she has no way to redirect this conversation, to bring it back onto safer ground. If their positions were reversed, Maggie would know how to do it. She’d know how to de-escalate, how to convince Purity that her interests were Maggie’s, the same way she could convince a hostage-taker that it was in their best interest to surrender.

But Alex doesn’t know how to do that.

Alex has no choice but to meet Purity her on her own playing field, with the winner claiming Maggie’s soul.

Not since Alex flew a Kryptonian ship into space have the stakes been this high.

“Maggie, you know it wasn’t like that.” Alex’s desperation makes her voice loud and sharp. She means it to be an entreaty, but as she hears herself, she fears that it sounds like a reprimand.

Purity clearly hears it that way. “You know a lot of things,” she says to Maggie, her voice soft, something feline--or maybe just animalistic--to the angle of her head. “You know what it is to be an innocent suffering for the sins of her elders.”

And Alex chokes, because it’s true, and Maggie knows it’s true, and Alex can tell that Maggie knows it by the way the slope of her shoulders softens, so little that an eye less familiar than Alex’s wouldn’t notice.

But Purity notices. She tips her head a little and smiles: _score one for the Worldkiller._

“You could be one of our chosen, Maggie Sawyer,” Purity croons. “You could… _belong_ … with us. You could help us to rebuild a world that’s better for people like you.”

“Don’t fall for it, Maggie,” Alex pleads. “She doesn’t care about you!”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

Maggie jerks like she’s been slapped and stumbles a step, and then another, past Alex and Purity, the point of her gun dropping further toward the floor. Alex can see her more clearly now, and there’s a spark in her eyes that Alex recognizes. It’s the same transparent relief that Alex had seen countless times when they’d find one another after a mission or a firefight, the one that says _the world nearly burned, but my place in it is intact, with you._

Alex silently curses. Her arms are tired from holding up her rifle, but their situation is too tenuous, too precarious, to move closer; to move at all.

“Maggie,” she tries again, making her voice soft, tentative, like reaching out to touch a nervous kitten. “Maggie.”

“Who’s your enemy, Maggie?” Purity says. “Is it me, telling you I want to protect you? Or is it _her_ ,” her voice turns hard, chin jerking toward Alex, “who cast you away as though you were disposable?”

“No, Maggie,” Alex gasps. Because Maggie could never be disposable -- she takes up as much space in Alex’s heart now as she did the day she’d given back her ring. How many times had Alex wished that she could push Maggie into her past? But Maggie had proven to be so permanent, so immovable, in Alex’s present, even when weeks and months had passed without seeing one another.

“Please,” Alex says, because for Maggie, she’s not above begging. “You know it was never like that--”

“Wasn’t it?” Purity snaps. Then, softer, “Are you sure, Maggie, that it wasn’t?”

Maggie’s shoulders have gone all but slack now, her gun aimed somewhere near Purity’s feet. Alex watches her blink, as though trying to clear her head, and then those brown eyes -- the ones she knows better than any others -- jump toward her.

And what she sees there _terrifies_ her.

The conflict, the dueling emotions, are one thing. But beneath that, the simmering rage that Alex has only caught glimpses of before, at being left time and time again, over and over, by everyone Maggie has ever loved.

Maggie and Alex came to their end together, and Alex has grieved for it, has questioned that decision, every day, because she’s felt like her happiness rode Maggie’s coattails out the door. But Alex has never in her life been left without somewhere to belong, while Maggie has had to build every home she’s ever had, tending each one with the care and attention she gives her beautiful (ridiculous, charming) bonsai trees. And none of them have lasted.

In their final moments, Maggie had handed Alex two things: her engagement ring and her house key. They, and the tips of Maggie’s fingers, had been damp, because she’d been wiping her tears.

The only key left on her keychain, after that, was the one for her motorcycle, and when she slipped it into her pocket, it didn’t make the jingling sound that keys are supposed to make.

Alex feels it like a physical blow: a shock of empathy for Maggie’s loneliness that’s so powerful it could bring her to her knees.

“Maggie, I’m sorry,” Alex says, between deep and heavy breaths. “I’m so, so sorry.”

But if Maggie hears her, she doesn’t respond.

Purity’s not promising love. She’s promising belonging, and it must be so appealing to Maggie to feel like someone wants her without compromise, instead of expecting Maggie to keep knocking on door after door in the hope of being welcomed in.

Maggie takes a step, and then another, toward Purity, her rifle hanging limp in her hands.

“You know your gun won’t really hurt me,” Purity says, “But _her,”_ she tips her head toward Alex, “her earplugs might dull my powers, but they won’t stop a bullet.”

And to Alex’s horror, Maggie’s grip tightens on the gun again, her shoulders tightening.

“Maggie,” Alex murmurs, trying to contain the sound of her fear. “Maggie, I’ve missed you since the day you left--”

“Since you _pushed her away!_ ”

“I’ve missed you!” Alex repeats, louder than Purity, her desperation close to the surface. “I’d give anything to have you back. To have _us_ back.”

The words escape; she hadn’t meant to say them. But in releasing them, she feels the kind of relief that comes from confessing to a crime, or a mistake. That’s how she knows they’re true.

Alex grovels, and Purity laughs high and hard like the villain she is. “Don’t listen to her, Maggie,” Purity says, “She’ll tell you what she has to tell you when she’s afraid for her life. Tomorrow, you’ll be trash again.”

Maggie’s eyes dart back and forth between Purity and Alex, her gun apparently forgotten.

“Never, Maggie.” Alex swallows, her throat thick. She’s running out of time and chances. So she brings her voice down, closer, more intimate. “Please. Please, don’t you see what she’s trying to do to us? She _knows_ that we’re weakest when we’re apart.”

“The words of someone who’s never had to build strength enough to be on her own.” Purity huffs, a haughty gesture a queen might make when she’s irritated by an underling. “She doesn’t know the courage it takes to be alone. Not like you do. Not like the strength I see in you.”

Maggie’s jaw sets, teeth grinding.

“She’s right,” Alex says. “I don’t know that, not like you do.” She braces her rifle against her shoulder, still trained on Purity, and lets go with one hand to reach out toward Maggie. Maggie, who’s inching toward Purity, her shoulders turning toward Alex as though Alex is about to become her new target.

Alex takes a deep breath and throws a Hail Mary.  “I’ve never had to be alone, but I’ve felt so alone since you left. All of me misses you, Maggie. My whole soul wants to be with you again.”

Maggie scowls, the spectrum of hope sliding through grief and rage in her eyes. At the end of it, she takes two quick steps toward Purity, pivoting and aiming her gun right between Alex’s eyes.

And now Alex and Maggie have their guns aimed at each other.

“Maggie, if we weren’t on a mission I’d drop my gun right now and let you take your shot.” Alex’s eyes are watering, and she struggles to keep her sight lined up. “Please, I’m begging you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

A dark, hollow laugh erupts like a demon from Maggie’s chest. It’s the first sound she’s made in all of this. “ _You don’t want hurt me,”_ she mocks. “My mom told me she’d never hurt me, when I was a kid. She said she’d always be there for me.”

She’s shoulder to shoulder with Purity now.

“Yes,” Purity says, a satisfied grin spreading across her face. “You know nothing of victimhood, Alexandra. Not like Maggie does, and so many others like her. You know nothing of the suffering you cause.”

Maggie is shaking, and Alex is shaking, and God only knows where the bullets will end up if either of them actually fires.

Purity comes to stand close behind Maggie, leaning forward to whisper in her ear. “Do it.” She makes her vowels whole, her consonants crisp, and it’s soothing and satisfying and hypnotic. “Shoot her,” she says. “You want to. Deep down, you want to hurt her for what she did. So do it, Maggie. Shoot her.”

And Alex knows that the mission is lost, because even to save the world, she could never shoot Maggie.

She holds, her hands shaking so hard she can barely aim, and stares into Maggie’s eyes down the barrels of their rifles. For a flash of an instant, she swears she can see something like love, or maybe something like sorrow, under Maggie’s hard, dark mask -- but it doesn’t look like it will be enough.

Alex has lost.

Maggie narrows her eyes, and her body tenses, preparing to fire--

And then suddenly she pivots, and Purity screams, falling to her knees.

Alex blinks.

There’s a syringe of condensed kryptonite sticking out of Purity’s thigh.

Maggie’s syringe.

“Come on!” Maggie yells, holstering her weapon, and Alex dives forward with a pair of ultra-strength kryptonite cuffs and a mask to keep Purity from screaming.

Purity’s -- Julia’s -- eyes roll back and her body goes limp, its animal power oozing out of her like a parasite leaving its host. That body Alex dives for, the body she kneels beside, is the body of the frailest kind of human, a puppet whose strings are cut. Alex feels her pulse. It’s still there, still steady.

She exhales and shakes her head, incredulous, and then looks up at Maggie to congratulate her. But Maggie is staring down at Julia, her rifle hanging in one trembling hand.

“Maggie, that was--”

“Call J’onn,” Maggie interrupts. “It’s done.”

She avoids Alex’s gaze.

 

* * *

 

**Two.**

 

J’onn brings a containment crew, and Maggie and Alex ride back to the DEO in one of the SUVs.

Alex is debriefed first, and then Maggie. Alex lingers, helping in the med bay with one eye on the door to J’onn’s office. As soon as she sees it open, she tells a tech to finish the stitches she’s started, peels off her gloves, and darts into the atrium.

“Maggie,” she calls, “wait.”

Maggie keeps walking. Two steps, three… then she slows, stops, waits.

“How are -- are you okay?” Alex asks when she catches up.

Maggie laughs a little but doesn’t meet Alex’s eyes. “Sure, Danvers, Super.”

It’s not true, of course, but Alex doesn’t know how to redirect. She licks her lips. They’re chapped, stress and dehydration getting the better of her at the end of the long day. “Good,” she finally says. “That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

They stand there, eyeing each other but not saying anything, until Maggie shakes her head in dismissal and turns to keep walking toward the elevator. She moves like her body is too heavy to carry. Alex, jittery with adrenaline and exhaustion and desperate to find a way to finish this conversation, follows her.

Maggie taps the call button and then steps back. She slips her hands into her front pockets and it makes her look small and timid.

“What do you want, Danvers?” she asks. She sounds as exhausted as she looks.

“I just -- I have to ask.” Alex crosses her arms over her chest, digging her fingertips into her triceps hard enough to bruise. “How did you keep her from seeing your plan in your head?”

Maggie exhales, long and slow, so Alex knows she heard her, but she doesn’t say anything. The elevator dings, and when Maggie steps into the car, Alex follows. She watches Maggie press the button for the underground garage.

“The things she was saying to me…. I’ve wanted to hear someone say those things to me since I was fourteen. That I was special. That I was... _chosen_ ,” she says.

The tiredness in Maggie’s voice tugs at something visceral in Alex. Hearing it makes her crave old intimacies: to bring Maggie home, wrap her in a blanket on the sofa, turn on the fire, make her a cup of chamomile tea. Maggie sleeps poorly if she doesn’t take time to unwind after work, no matter how exhausted she is.

Maggie opens her hands in front of her, palms up and out, as though offering something to her own distorted, foggy reflection in the elevator’s metal doors, and then drops them, tangling her fingers together. “I just focused on them and kind of… dimmed everything else. It wasn’t that hard.”

The elevator sinks to a halt and it tugs on Alex’s stomach, which is already twisting and pulling itself up into her diaphragm and down into her gut at the same time. The doors ding and open again, and the elevator fills with the parking lot smell of rubber and gasoline.

Maggie pushes her hair away from her face and holds it there for half a breath. When she glances over at Alex, Alex’s hands twitch and she craves to reach over and pull those hands down, to hold those wrists between in her fingers, to loosen the tension in Maggie’s bunched up shoulders.

But she doesn’t.

“Don’t worry,” Maggie says, with a small, sad half-smile. “I won’t hold you to anything you said when you were scared.” She drops her hands and steps out of the elevator, fumbling for the zipper on the jacket pocket where she keeps her keys.

Alex listens to the sound of Maggie’s boots resonating on the concrete garage floor. She can see Maggie’s motorcycle parked at the end of the row. From time to time, they’d take Maggie’s bike and ride together out to the coast, or up into the mountains. Riding double on Alex’s bike wasn’t comfortable for more than a short trip, with the passenger having to lean on the driver who carried both of their weights on her wrists. But on Maggie’s, sitting upright, they could ride for hours, and Maggie had never been weird about letting Alex do half the driving.

Driving Maggie’s bike, with Maggie relaxed against her back along the long beach-front roads, made Alex feel trusted.

Riding behind Maggie, warm against her body on those winding mountain highways, made her feel safe.

It’s not everything she’s ever wanted.

But without this, nothing else she wants seems to matter that much.

Machinery rumbles quietly to life and the elevator doors begin to close, like curtains closing on Maggie’s retreating back. Alex doesn’t think, she just shoots a hand out to stop them.

 

* * *

 

**One.**

 

The elevator doors protest and bounce back and then Alex runs through them, first at a jog, and then at a sprint, her footfalls double-time to Maggie’s until Maggie stops and turns.

With a tired, resigned patience, Maggie watches Alex approaching. But her keys, twitching in her hands, reveal her nerves.

Maggie doesn’t say anything when Alex stops in front of her, and Alex wishes she’d had the chance to plan this better.

“It’s not that I was scared,” is what she says.

Maggie rolls her eyes and raises her hand dismissively. Her keys jingle a little. “Alex--”

“I mean I _was_ scared,” Alex rushes on, “I was--I was terrified, but fear isn’t the only thing that made me say what I said. It wasn’t the most important thing.”

Maggie’s hand drops, and her breath is loud in the quiet garage. Alex imagines it heavy and foggy, like steam in cold air, and Maggie deflates as she releases it. Her exhaustion finds another gear. She looks steeped in a weariness that soaks into her bones.

“Why did you say it, then?” Maggie directs the question more to the bumper of the parked sedan beside her than to Alex’s face, and she doesn’t sound like she cares about the answer. She sounds like she wants the conversation to end, and she understands that when Alex gets like this, the only way out is through.

Alex will take that opening, however reluctantly given. Her fingers tuck into her hair as she steadies herself. Some distracted part of her deep brain realizes that she’s wearing her DEO blacks outside the base. J’onn will give her hell if he catches her.

When she forces herself to look up at Maggie’s profile, Maggie is gazing, numb and determined, at the green paint on the trunk of that parked sedan.

“I keep--I keep confronting death, Maggie. So many times, since we--since you--” _What are the words? What is the verb, for what happened to them?_

Alex gives up, swallows, and starts on a different track. “Kara took me hopping through alternate universes.”

Maggie shakes her head a little, her quiet laugh incredulous, but not disbelieving.

“She _did_ ,” Alex says, “and I found myself standing over an open grave with a rifle aimed point-blank at my heart. And then a few weeks later I took second point on that sting operation to get Reign at the bank downtown, and was lucky to get out with a broken tibia.”

“I thought that was you.” Maggie’s tiredness masks all but a hint of exasperated humor. “You should read us in next time so we know not to follow up on the silent alarm.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex says, because what else can she say? She just doesn’t want Maggie to walk away.

She doesn’t want Maggie to ever walk away again.

“It was all such a rush. We didn’t think of it,” Alex finishes.

“Well, you know. City cops. Bank robberies are generally a thing we’re good for.” The barb is dulled by the tiredness in Maggie’stone.

Alex leans forward. Her hands come up, palms open, between them, like the cells of her body are drawn to Maggie’s charge. “You’re good for _so many_ things,” she says.

Maggie’s reaction is the opposite of what Alex intended. She stiffens, her shoulders squaring, and when she finally turns to look at Alex, her eyes are bright and hard. “What do you _want_ , Alex?”

Alex flinches, her fingers curling back light frightened coral, but she inhales and forces herself to remain as honest and brave as she can.“I want you to know I meant what I said in there. About my regrets. About what I want.”

And Maggie snaps. “So lay out what you fucking want, Danvers. To _me_ , right here and now, because I’m already going home to a bottle of Patrón and the longer this takes, the more of it I’m going to want to drink.”

“I want _you_ ,” Alex says. She feels pressure at the back of her throat, but she’s not sure whether her body wants to cry or vomit or scream or beg.

“Pretty sure you had me.” Maggie’s voice breaks, and Alex feels it like a break in her own heart. “Pretty sure we had each other, and it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, in the end.”

“In the end,” Alex echoes, “But before that--”

“Doesn’t matter,” Maggie interrupts.

“Yes, it does.”

Maggie’s jaw snaps shut and her nostrils flare, so tense that Alex imagines a mustang ready to bolt.

Somewhere not far below them, a car door slams, and an engine starts up. Alex smells exhaust, and uses the noise as an excuse to pause and collect her thoughts. Nothing has gone to plan today. Maggie seems to understand, and to Alex’s great relief, waits with her until the sound of the car engine fades.

“I’ve felt empty without you,” Alex says, quieter now. She extends a hand, trembling, toward Maggie, and then thinks better of it, pulling it back until her knuckle digs into her breastbone. “There’s a hole here that you used to fill and I--I dug it myself. I know I did.”

Maggie deflates. “That’s what a breakup does to you, Alex. You haven’t been through this before, but it does get better eventually.”

“Have you been through this before, Maggie? Was it like this when you broke up with Emily, or even with Darla?”

Maggie winces, and Alex watches the shine in her eyes as it intensifies.

“No,” she finally says, quiet and hoarse. “It wasn’t.”

It’s a tiny speck of leeway and Alex seizes it, nodding frantically, almost desperately, as her fingers tie a gordian knot of white knuckles and tight sinews in front of her heart. “I regret it. I felt a gap in my future when I imagined not having kids, Maggie, but not having you, it feels like -- it’s like you’re an amputated limb that won’t stop aching. It’s a gap in my present, and now the future just seems… blank.”

Maggie’s chin tucks and trembles and she fidgets with her bike key, scraping its ridges along the pad of her thumb. Alex wants to reach out and grab that hand. She would curl her finger under that thumb and press her lips to its knuckle.

“How many times have I flirted with death since we met, Maggie? I can’t ask a kid to sit by my bedside a half-dozen times a year, wondering if I’m going to wake up. But -- but when I wake up and you’re not there, it makes me want to just go to sleep again.”

Maggie’s fist folds around her keys, clenching tight.

Alex continues. “When I wake up after being hurt, Maggie, I want to come home to you. And--and I want to be the face you wake up to, the home you come to when you need to heal.”

Maggie tips her head up, her eyes watering. “It sounds like you’re saying you want to get back together.”

Alex’s heart opens and reaches and _yearns_. “Yeah, Maggie. That’s what I’m saying.”

Maggie laughs, wet and sad, and shakes her head helplessly. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Danvers.” And finally, she turns those wet, sad eyes to Alex. “Do you expect me to just say yeah, okay, sure, our busted engagement’s water under the bridge, let’s pick up some Thai for dinner?”

“No,” Alex insists. “I know we can’t do -- I mean, that wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

“I can’t just be your friend, Alex.”

“I can’t be yours.”

“Then what do you want?” Maggie’s voice sounds as hollow as Alex feels.

Alex bites her lip and realizes how much her own body has folded in on herself, her shoulders tucking, sternum pulling toward her belly button. She pulls herself tall and drops her hands to her sides and forces herself to face Maggie with the softest, most vulnerable parts of herself. She even tries to smile, though it probably looks more like she’s offering teeth to the dentist.  

“Pool?” she says, with all the confidence she can muster. “Tomorrow night?”

(It’s not a lot of confidence.)

Maggie blinks furiously. She looks away and dabs at the corner of one eye, and then the other, with a fingertip, and then shakes her head.

“I don’t think so, Danvers.”

And Alex’s heart, so carefully held together through this long, brutish day and the months of grief leading up to it, breaks.

She stands frozen as Maggie walks to her bike.

Puts on her helmet.

Starts it.

Drives away.

When the sound of the Triumph motor has faded into the distance, Alex is still standing there.

She can’t seem to remember how to move. Her limbs feel like they’ve rusted into place.

Then, without warning, her diaphragm heaves, once, then twice. With her final functioning brain cells, she scans for a trash can, certain that she’s going to throw up -- but what comes out is a sob more burning, more brutal, than any she’s felt since -- well, since the last time she watched Maggie walk away.

She stumbles forward between that fucking green sedan and whatever car is parked next to it, and just barely catches herself on the concrete wall before falling to her knees on the ground, the sobs coming uncontrollably. Her stomach aches, a vacuum closing in on itself, and she presses her fist there, trying to figure out how to get herself under control so she can go back to the locker room and change her clothes to go home.

But she can’t. She didn’t know her body could make sounds and snot and spit and tears like this, in this quantity. Her knees will be bruised from where they hit the gritty floor, and she can’t even figure out how to open her eyes again.

And then, suddenly, she’s warm. There’s a presence, familiar. A body, warmer than human, pressed to her side.

“Shh,” Kara says, pulling Alex into her chest. “You were so brave.”

Because of course, Kara heard.

“No,” Alex chokes.

“Yes,” Kara says. Alex is getting snot all over Kara’s cashmere cardigan and tries to pull away, but Kara, so giving of her strength, won’t let her. “I’ve got you, Alex. I’ve got you.”

Alex lets Kara fly her home, still in her DEO blacks. J’onn will throw a fit tomorrow--but that’s tomorrow.

She sits on Kara’s couch, wearing Kara’s sweatpants and hoodie and wrapped in an afghan, while Kara orders them pizza and potstickers. Somehow, she manages to stop crying.

“I made the biggest mistake,” are the first words she manages to get out.

“No, Alex. You were brave, to do what you did today.”

But Alex shakes her head. “Letting her go in the first place. That was the mistake.”

Tomorrow, Alex knows that Kara will contradict her; she’ll try to talk her out of her misery, at least enough to get through the first day, and then the next.

But for now, Kara knows just to sit with her and hold her and not say anything.

An hour later, when they’re starting the next episode of _Stranger Things_ and Alex has managed to eat a few potstickers, her phone vibrates. It’s sitting near Kara’s end of the coffee table, so Alex waves for her to hand it over.

“Probably J’onn wondering why my tac vest wasn’t signed back in,” she says.

But it’s not J’onn.

The text says _Pool. Tomorrow night. 8:00 pm._

Then the phone vibrates again, in her hand, with another message: _If you’re still interested_.

“Kara,” Alex says, sitting up. She reaches blindly until she can whack her sister in the knee. “Kara, look. It’s Maggie. Look.”

“I know.” Alex can hear the smile in Kara’s voice.

“This means what I think it means, right?” Alex asks. “I’m not crazy, right?”

“No, you’re not crazy,” Kara says. She leans forward and hugs Alex again. “You’re not crazy at all.”

 

* * *

 

**Go.**

 

The next evening, at 8:00 pm, Alex meets Maggie to play pool.  


**Author's Note:**

> This thing was a (world)killer to write. I conceived it for Twitter, so fleshing it out was really, really difficult. So like, HUUUUUUUGE shout-out to [Kelinswriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelinswriter/pseuds/Kelinswriter) for not just beta-ing this, but giving me a full-on, no-holds-barred editorial review on the first draft. I basically went to her like "*cries* THIS ISN'T WORKING" and she came back like "No it's not, but HERE'S HOW TO FIX IT" and the end result is, I hope, something I can be proud of. 
> 
> That said: this is a one-shot intended to end where I've ended it, so while calls for sequels or opposite-POV versions are always flattering, please know that those aren't in the cards for this fic unless someone else wants to write 'em. I have another fic underway and my writing energy is going to that one now.


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